I
Learning to be human
300,000 years.
That’s how long we believe humans to have inhabited this earth. The first schools were reported to be in Ancient Egypt in 2061-2010BC.
It is only in the last couple of hundred that we have been able to peek inside the human brain and body and begin to piece together the mysteries of how it works. Of the last 300,000 years of learning, growth, adaptation and development, we have only in the relative blink of an eye begun to unravel how we learn. So, surely it would appear folly or arrogance or sheer aggrandizement that we have decided that leaning outside ourselves on the power and promise of AI is potentially now the way to deliver the education and development opportunities for children and young people.
The development of human culture and cognition from the mimetic to our current theoretic era as outlined in Merlin Donald’s origins of the modern mind, describes the journey from our early human development through to our developed abilities to share learning through communication, writing, art and common languages. It is worth remembering that as we have journeyed through these developmental stages as a species that we have not discarded each development like fallen autumn leaves but have retained them, building and growing from their foundations. This means that what worked for our earliest ancestors to support learning and thinking has been preserved to be used in conjunction with and alongside each new development. We have never in our development discarded what has worked to replace with something new, but have added to the ways in which our minds and our bodies process information and learn from the world around us.
And we are, in our modern worlds, when compared to our 300,000-year developmental trajectory, in the relative click of a finger, now required to process vast amounts of new and changing information. We have built worlds designed to focus on and prioritise abilities to process and understand information at speed, to lean on only one or two of our senses when exploring and learning, and to reduce much of our education to a solo cognitive endeavour, racing to fit as much as possible in in as short a time frame, with ever increasing rapidity.
And we do so in complete confidence that this is the right thing to do.
But how can we be so sure?
How can we say in a world where we have been quietly developing for over 300,000 years, building relationships, developing internal systems sensitive to the slightest change in touch, temperature, smell or peripheral vision stimulus, a system that is multiple earth circumferences of nerve and vessel networks, that is billions of individual neurons ready to fire and connect, that is unique in each of our DNA, unique in each of our appearances, preferences and has the ability to love, to laugh, to grieve, to cry, that the way to learn to be human should be outsourced to something that is not. When looking to replace any element of our teaching, we are investing in the development of technology for replacement of human interaction. Humans can indeed potentially learn information from interacting with AI and technology but at what cost? When learning the same knowledge or skills from a human they are simultaneously learning to be human. They learn eye contact, facial expressions, gesture, voice tone, social cues and social norms. We know how sensitive the human body is to expression; even the smallest of expressions, known as micro expressions which are barely perceptible, feed into our understanding of communication, validity, truthfulness trust and empathy. Indeed studies have shown that when people have used Botox, therefore reducing their micro expressions, not only are they less able to empathise with the feelings of others as they are not able to subconsciously mimic the speaker’s micro expressions, but the things that they say themselves are less likely to be perceived as true as they are not accompanied by micro expressions. It is elements such as these, the imperceptible humanness of person-to-person real life interactions that we should not be quick to sideline. These are developments that have over hundreds of thousands of years been hard wired into how we kept ourselves safe and how we learn, develop and function. Just because we cannot see much of how we make sense of the world, does not mean we should overly simplify its replacement and begin offering it out to devices and tech as outsourced human freelancers.
Our bodies and our minds are hard wired for human connection. In early childhood and as babies, we have likely all heard of the positive benefits of skin-to-skin contact, releasing positive chemical reactions for bonding in both baby and adult. We know that children can be calmed by a toy or blanket that smells like a parent and we have all experienced the relief of a well-timed supportive hug, arm around the shoulder or a hand to hold in a moment of challenge, grief, fear, or worry. We are, despite what the hubris of our intellectual modern minds would have us believe, still visceral. We are both cognitive and bodily and in outsourcing elements of our learning and development we can artificially ostracise our human elements in a rush to intensify our efficiencies. Whatever the tech, however intelligent it is, it will always be artificial. It will never be able to replace the sensory inputs and reactions of interacting with a human. Humans are, on both our best and on our worst days and everything in between, still pumping out signs, chemical signals, biological quirks and feedback that our fellows will be interpreting deep in 300,000-year-old systems that preceded even our development of a shared language, let alone a shared drive.
AI may be able to simplify menial tasks; it may be able to replicate writing or complete complex calculations, but it cannot and should not aim to replace the 3D, biological, emotional, cognitively rich and deeply engrained arts of being human. And every time we choose to artificially replace a human interaction in a child’s learning experiences, we are setting up a potential deficit. They may well perform well in tests as a result of interaction with technology but for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction; if we remove the human element, we remove the simultaneous opportunity to learn to be human.
AI presents us therefore with a choice. We are at a crossroads. What do we really want it to do? What elements of our children’s current human interactions do we want to remove to replace with an AI element? Which elements of human cognition and development do we have sound evidence for that AI supports and that AI does not impede or harm? Or are we going to jump in two footed with a generation of children, many already deficit in human interaction from lockdowns during covid and encourage more screen time, more intervention and involvement of non-human methods and simply lean in? We are in uncharted waters. We have no evidence that AI use will in the long-term support learning and development in ways that are more effective than without it.
Our learning as humans has, through the ages, broadly been based on play, cognitive apprenticeship and mimicry. We have made sense of the world through rich interactions with it in playful ways, then been supported by more capable peers, mentors and teachers to amass new knowledge and skills through being shown, making careful observations, practising and receiving feedback. We are designed to learn from each other. Young children are hard wired to follow the eyes, hands and mouths of adults, and we know that narrative and story form a key part of how we learn from our teachers, parents and mentors. These human elements, those of careful observation, feedback, interaction with real life materials, people and places are how humans learn. The connections made during these interactions are the basis for developing rich and highly connected schema. AI cannot simulate the feeling of sand trickling through a four-year old’s fingers and their teacher supporting their play with rich and varied language and provocations at child level, outside, delivered with a smile and a reference to the child’s recent holiday their parent mentioned at drop off time. AI cannot support a seven-year-old to mix slip for making a clay pot, asking if they’d like to paint the pot and maybe give to their Granny who they know is in hospital as a present. It can’t celebrate when the football team who’ve just played a stinker of a match in wind and sleet and with their two best players injured still goes on to win the game. It can’t read a story and watch the wide-eyed faces of the class at the exciting parts and try to do character voices that are so awful the class are in hysterics. It can’t build shared empathy and understanding or provide comfort, encouragement and model what it means to be human. Because it’s not.
If we want to build humans in school, we must look with precision and clarity about how we can leverage the benefits of AI’s efficiency without accidentally outsourcing the precious and privileged work of the core role of teaching which is to ensure our children ultimately learn to be human. The richness of knowledge, the achievements and follies of mankind, the beauty and awe and wonder that our world has in abundance need to be offered up with human hand and human voice. We have no other option if we want our children to become uniquely human; anything else is just artificial.
Thinking Flexibly 